The Hook By The Door: Elves of Nine Ashes Short Story #8

Rance Ashburn’s bench is in the shed. That is the whole of the difficulty, and it takes one sentence.

The shed has two doors — his, and Elspeth Greenwarden’s — and one room between them, divided by habit rather than by anything a hand can be put on. For ten years he went in only when he was certain she was out. The silence ended some seasons back, over a pot of tea, with nobody making a speech about it. The door did not end with it.
Then a woman in Thornbridge orders a linen chest, and the lid will not go on a kitchen table, and the only nine feet of flat in Nine Ashes is on the other side of that latch.
Rance is very good at measuring. He finds eighteen inches that should not be there, and he is right about them, and in one morning he builds something square and plumb and beautiful straight down the middle of the room — and a neighbor walks past the propped door at exactly the wrong moment.
What follows is a man taking apart the best small piece he has made in ten years, backwards, through the order he made it in, with the same care. It is one spring week in an elven village where nobody raises a voice and nothing gets explained, and the largest thing that happens is a hook driven into a post at a height that suits nobody at all.
The eighth of the Nine Ashes short stories: standalone cozy fantasy short stories set in the world of The Elves of Nine Ashes. No prior reading required. About an hour.

For readers who loved Travis Baldree, Becky Chambers, T. Kingfisher, Heather Fawcett and Sangu Mandanna.